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Blackberry 8300 Curve

It reached the time for me to finally upgrade my old O2 XDA Mini-S I got just over a year and a half ago. I was tempted by the Sony Ericsson K810i, but I don’t think I go ever go back to a phone without a proper QWERTY keyboard. That didn’t leave me with much choice but to either get another 02 XDA or a Blackberry. When I saw the new Blackberry 8300 Curve, I knew that was the phone for me. Compared to my XDA it feels tiny in my hand (It’s less then half as thick) and when I first saw the keyboard I thought there was no way in hell I was going to be able to type on it, but after mucking about with it for a few hours it’s actually really really nice to use. The buttons feel nice and responsive (I wonder how long they’ll stay that way).

One of the features I was really excited about was the push email. It took me a while to set it all up properly as I wanted to be able to keep a record of any emails I sent from my Crackberry, so I’ve got filters and BCCs setup all over the shop.

A couple of small niggles which most probably can be solved if I delve deep enough into the settings. One being when I go to my Emails or SMS and MMS sections it defaults to showing me both my sent and received messages on the same screen. There must be some way of defaulting it to show me the incoming folder only, but I haven’t worked out how yet.

Another thing is I’m surprised MS haven’t developed a version of Messenger for the Blackberry yet. There are Aim, Yahoo and GoogleTalk apps but no Messenger. Obviously there are 3rd party apps but they require you to fork out for it, which I don’t really want to do.

It really is a lovely and dare I say it, beautiful phone. It feels absolutely great in my hand. I’ll try the built in 2MP camera at some point and post some test photos.